The good, the bad and the ugly in Nintendo’s upcoming lineup

Nintendo showed off both its strengths and weaknesses as a game company last week in San Francisco as it debuted its lineup for fall 2008 and games for next year.

Over two days, I saw games that I liked, including the wonderfully creative “Wii Music,” and games that I hated, like Activision Blizzard’s “Call of Duty World at War” for the Wii. And then there were weird games, like “Rayman Raving Rabbids TV Party,” which required me to steer with my butt. Here are my first impressions, based on spending a small amount of time with these games hands-on.

Shigeru Miyamoto, Nintendo’s top game designer, showed off a version of Wii Music for the first time in the spring of 2006, conducting a faux orchestra using only hand gestures. The actual game debuts on Oct. 20, and will likely reestablish Nintendo as the king of innovation.

Like “Guitar Hero” and “Rock Band,” Wii Music basically lets you pretend you’re an air guitarist — with a little more diversity. You can strum a virtual violin by holding the Wii Nunchuk (an attachment to the Wii remote) up in the air as if you were cradling the neck of a violin. When you move your other hand (holding the regular remote) back and forth, the character on the screen mimics your movements and violin sounds emanate from the TV. You can do the same for drums, guitars, saxophones — a total of 60 instruments. The movements you make produce the expected sounds.

Wii Music is one of those games that doesn’t really keep score, so there is no way to lose. That’s a big contrast to Guitar Hero, where you can “fail out” of a song if you don’t hit the right notes to match the playback of a song. The idea behind Nintendo’s game is to get everyone involved in music, from the youngest to the oldest, from the musically-inclined to those who have never picked up an instrument before.

I am in the latter camp. Never played an instrument in my life — at least not seriously. But I had no trouble jamming with the Nunchuk in my left hand, the Wii remote in my right, and the Wii Balance Board under my feet. I started with the snare drums and just started banging away. I tapped with my feet to play the bass drum and the hi-hat cymbal. It didn’t sound good, but I had fun just cutting loose and making a lot of noise at the same time.

I played more songs on a console connected to a big screen in a room with good acoustics. You can choose from among 50 different well-known songs and a dozen or so different venues, including a plaza or outerspace. I tried the saxophone by holding the Wii remote length wise. I bent low to make low sounds and I pulled up high to make high notes. It was cool to do that without any other Wii accessories needed, but the fact that you can use the add-ons to play so many instruments says something about the versatility of the Wii.

As many as four can play, and you can record videos of your songs and share them with someone else. Unfortunately, you can’t live jam with someone over the Internet. However, you can share a track with them and they can add an instrumental performance to it. I played “Ode to Joy” and “Every Breath You Take.”

This title will have mass appeal, just like the smash hit Wii Sports, because anybody can play it. It is a title for the rest of us. You can use it as light social entertainment, get your kids excited about playing an instrument, or play like a pro